Bernardo Villela is like a mallrat except at the movies. He is a writer, director, editor and film enthusiast who seeks to continue to explore and learn about cinema, chronicle the journey and share his findings.

A woman’s journey from moderate conservative to political zealotry sees her run afoul of the hidden powers that govern her adopted hometown and threatens those closest to her.

Sea of Blood

Mahtantu is named after the the Lenape god of death. As Thanksgiving 2016 approaches he plots to upstage his hometown’s fictitious holiday pageant.

Rimmon

Rimmon was born half-human and half-demon, a self-proclaimed demidemon, he struggles with the duality of his nature, his birth, distance from his biological parents and finding acceptance in the demonic hierarchy. The only friends he’s known in the short span of his life challenge his loyalties when they ask for a dangerous favor.

A neutron star is one that glows more brightly after it “death,” similarly these filmmakers and actors do. It’s a counterpart to the Lifetime Achievement Award which is intended for filmmakers and actors who are very much alive and kicking.

2017 Carrie Fisher

Carrie Fisher’s death in late 2016 was a cruel shock. The tragedy was of course compounded by the fact that her mother Debbie Reynolds died the very next day.

Shortly after their deaths HBO released a doc about them that they were producing anyway. I saw Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds shortly after it became available. It was an insightful, touching and bittersweet look at their life together. It underscored the fact that too much about her career didn’t get attention until after the fact. I remember maybe vaguely hearing about her script doctoring once but by the time the fact came up again I couldn’t recall if that was something I ever knew or if it was new information.

And, of course, after the fact I would find things that either I forgot she was in (Austin Powers International Man of Mystery) or never knew realized was in (When Harry Met Sally…, Hannah and Her Sisters).

Then, of course, there was The Last Jedi. Of course, when I went to see it I knew it would be one of the last new films I’d see her in (Wonderwell is slated for release this year) but I didn’t expect Leia’s role to be that much larger than it was previously and that much more epic. In the nominating process I asked myself the hard question: was she included in the nominees only because it was a posthumous honor? Absolutely not.

For those reasons and so many more Carrie Fisher gets the honor this year.

However, in the BAM Awards as entertainer of the year was not something I foresaw.

Throughout the year I made mental notes of actors and directors who had multiple credits to their name who made their mark through a large swath of the calendar year. I usually like these awards to be like revelations rather than conscious decisions. Once I tried resisting choosing King, I knew he was the only choice.

And I only resisted because picking the creator of source material would be a new frontier, but it is worthy of inclusion. I always cite the author of source material in my nominations on equal footing with the screenwriters.

With it seeming, based on early looks, that King was going to have a very good year, many retrospectives came but the new work showed there are people working now who want to work with his material, and know how to mold it for film.

And it was a very good year for Stephen King, and the BAM Awards were no exception. Films based on his works garnered 30 nominations; including three of five Best Adapted Screenplay nominations.

He also saw two more of his works turned into TV shows Mr. Mercedes and The Mist.

He and his son Owen released the timely novel Sleeping Beauties, and he has a new novel due out this spring; so it’s clear he’s still kicking but his impact on me and many has been long-lasting and will continue, but 2017 cinematically was a standout for highlighting his work, and it’s why he’s the recipient of this prize.

The delay in posting any and all of these honorary awards has been due in large part to wrapping a long first draft of a piece of fiction and the fact that a record keeping mistake almost led me to pick the same Lifetime Achievement recipient as last year. Not that John Williams hasn’t done enough for multiple lifetimes but let’s spread the wealth.

As such I will post at least one honoree a day to balance this blog with my other works.

As I deliberated picking people who aren’t exceptionally old as other awards do, I wasn’t inspired by many of my options until I looked at the history of my own awards and how in recent years I had seen the reemergence of some of my favorites into the nominated list. So, that seemed like the perfect reason to celebrate all of their works as I also like to select people who are still making an impact.

In the early days of these awards when I was prone to revisionism and trying to create credible nominees from 1981. I was compelled to go back and watch as many things as I could by my favorite directors and actors. Jessica Lange was among these actresses.

Even scrapping those provisional, untrue awards she made more than enough of a mark. Her nominations as Best Actress in four consecutive years was a feat I didn’t notice until I started composing this piece (I like to compose these award without being conscious of things like how many nominations a film is racking up or if so-and-so made it in the year before).

I believe I first knew of Jessica Lange when in a high school cinema class we screened the 1976 King Kong. That allowed me then to seek out and watch many of her films in approximate chronological order. Eventually she became an actress I made a point of going out to the movies to see.

Like many other admirers, I was thrilled when American Horror Story acted as a renaissance for her career. When In Secret was released I rushed out to see it, and I thought for a Zola novel I did not know much about it portrayed a story of that vintage in as modern a way as possible without reinventing it, and Lange stole the entire film, and she was not only nominated again but won her third BAM Award.

In 2015 it was time for her to move on from AHS, but recently she made another tour-de-force appearance on a television series Feud: Bette and Joan, which bears mentioning here as she played Joan Crawford and was dealing with the struggle of being a woman of a certain age in Hollywood, and contrary to her trajectory playing an actress whose talents were never fully appreciated. That role showed that she by no means is done, as I prefer these honorees to be.

When I posted my BAM Award honorees, it was another long day and I claimed I’d post special awards the following day. The delay in posting any and all of these honorary awards has been due in large part to wrapping a long first draft of a piece of fiction and the fact that a record keeping mistake almost led me to pick the same Lifetime Achievement recipient as last year. Not that John Williams hasn’t done enough for multiple lifetimes, but let’s spread the wealth.

As such I will instead post at least one honoree a day to balance this blog with my other works.

As I deliberated picking people who aren’t exceptionally old as other awards do, I wasn’t inspired by many of my options until I looked at the history of my own awards and how in recent years I had seen the reemergence of some of my favorites into the nominated list. So, that seemed like the perfect reason to celebrate all of their works as I also like to select people who are still making an impact.

Prior to her most well-known work (Working Girl) she had already made a splash with two films that would end up standing the test of time (Body Double and Something Wild).

While the string of films she was in following Working Girl had varying degrees of success commercially, critically, I enjoy most and like her work in them even more (Pacific Heights, Bonfire of the Vanities, Paradise, Shining Through, Born Yesterday, Milk Money, Nobody’s Fool, Buffalo Girls, Celebrity, Another Day in Paradise, Crazy in Alabama and RKO 281 among those not yet mentioned).

Smaller independent works intervened between her last BAM nomination and The Disaster Artist, but I’d not happened to come across them or gone out of my way to see them, though I should have. The Disaster Artist was a tremendous jolt, a reminder that I’ve not tracked down enough of her works as she was one of the first actors or directors I made a point of seeing.

“Do you even want to be an actor?” her character, an acting instructor, says to Greg Sestero (Dave Franco) in The Disaster Artist. He responds in the affirmative. “Well, you hide it well,” she retorts, and in a film about the making of a cult film, and in many ways the cruelty of Hollywood and entertainment in general; Melanie’s part, and Sharon Stone, as an objectifying talent agent, seems a very conscious and shrewd commentary: these are talented, professional women deserving of respect and recognition.

This year I switched up a few things. First, as opposed to live-blogging the nominees I’m live-blogging the announcements category-by-category. I will also be brief in any writing I add to the categories (except maybe special categories) as I feel most may just skim anyway. Plus, I feel a sparsity of words may underscore the fact that when it comes to the BAM Awards, which reflect my year in film alone, as arduous as the decision-making process is it is the nomination that means the most.

The selected nominee is in BOLD and pictured.

UPDATE: The 2017 specific categories are done. The special awards will get their own post tomorrow, the 10th, just as they did last year.

Between the time I saw this film and started thinking about awards I did not think about it that often. When considering each category it kept coming up. There’s a reason why. Here’s my original Letterboxd review.

A deftly handled meticulously-framed and lit film that within its subtle introduction to its characters finds their hearts and souls at times of quiet, introspective crisis and allows the characters to find each other and voice their concerns. The movements are small but meaningful and underscored by a score that folds itself into the visual, aiding the overall impact. Haley Lu Richardson is a revelation.

All I said about how It came together below is thanks to Muschietti’s vision. His previous film was Mama which I thought had a brilliant and protracted climactic sequence. He brought that to this film as well and it was needed.

Getting this category down to five was one of the things that made me expand acting categories. It just wasn’t going to happen. These performances are varied, and arresting in their own way. It’d be an oversimplification to say James McAvoy was selected for playing a character with multiple personalities. What really does it how he becomes the characters entirely. It’s a work of genius on his part.

This was another tough one and all these ladies deserve their due. Carla Juri doesn’t have much time on screen but all her scenes are replete with pathos, Katherine Keener is appropriately hypnotic in Get Out; in a sort of reverse side of the coin Betty Buckley’s captivating, sensitive portrayal of a psychiatrist who is willing to see past the commonplace in Split. Carrie Fisher brought a sagacity and played much bigger scenes in this Star Wars as opposed to the one prior and buoyed an even better film. But as much was follow Lady Bird’s travails in the eponymous film it is Laurie Metcalf that ends up dominating it.

When selecting a collective award it can be difficult to parse it out. The truism “You’re only as strong as your weakest link” can be used. But That couldn’t break this down. What ultimately made all the difference was moments of deep emotional impact that hit me from as many players in parts large and small. The kids of It have most of their movies moments, many people get their fair share in The Big Sick, Star Wars, and Get Out. The Disaster Artist works so well because there are so many actors I like in it having a ball. But the cast of Wind River hit me almost to a man with moments of emotional resonance but also unadulterated humanity and portraying the human condition is what acting is and this was the best example of it in all of its shades.

As the category below this one also got rather difficult to choose, but eventually I did. All these nominees are very noteworthy. If you only know Ella Anderson from her role on Henry Danger you owe it to yourself to see The Glass Castle if you couldn’t tell the talent that was there its on full display in this part. Millicent Simmonds also does some silent work and breaks out carrying her own half of Wonderstruck easily. Izabela Vidovic is a marvel in Wonder and breathes such life into Thornton Wilder’s Our Town it was a joy to behold. Lulu Wilson is here again and she may be nominated quite a few more times the way she;s going. But the burst-on-to-the-scene dominant performance imbuing Beverly Marsh will all the attributes she needed to have is Sophia Lillis, she’s cool, she’s misunderstood, funny, genuinely kind to all her Losers’ Club friends even the ones who are hangin’ tough, and is fighting her own villain at home; and she pulls it off with the ease of a veteran, which is why she gets the award.

Bear with me the format will be a little different here. First came these realizations.

One thing that’s curious is that as you proceed through a process over and over you start noticing things about it you never considered before. The first split in the youth categories was to allow young actors in smaller roles to get recognition too. And then why not give kids equal footing (in terms of categories) with their adult counterparts? With so many more opportunities now with cable, premium cable, streaming services offering not just series but films it seems odd to try and cite statistics about young performers transitioning to adult roles. It’s an unfair comparison. But what I can tell through this change in focus at my awards that the opportunities may still be unequal (skewed against women and girls) but the talent not just abounds but it is canny. But the newest observation is that having a category that actors could age out of may make it seem like destiny that a multiple nominee will get it “next year” or that the field just opened up because a a multiple-winner is now in the adult bracket (recent examples being Elle Fanning and Kodi Smit-McPhee). But the award has to be merit-based and given with the realization that literally any of these actors could have been chosen.

The above was all well and good and leading to an actual decision among these nominees.

It’s been one of the two hardest categories to pick all year. This year in the interest of symmetry and due to decision fatigue in part I gave all the Youth Categories six nominees rather than having the occasional category balloon as I had for a while. But I didn’t regret it at all and all the nominees are great!

Alas, when it came time to post who I was going to award on my 5,897th mind-change I accidentally thought of the wrong name when going to do an image search. Then I realized going back to my roots that I created this award as a reaction to the Oscars. They’ve had six ties in 89 years, on every 14.833. This is the 22nd edition of my awards. I’m owed a tie, it was hard enough getting down to two. The BAMs go to…

Lilly Aspell Wonder WomanChiara Aurelia Gerald’s Game
Lola Flanery Home Again
Peyton Kennedy XX
Amiah Miller War for the Planet of the Apes
Olivia Kate Rice The Glass Castle

Playing the younger version of an adult protagonist can be at times thankless and also a narrative afterthought. Lilly Aspell does quite well in the prologue of Wonder Woman but then Gal shows up and is Wonder Woman and you have to take a view of the whole film to keep her in mind. Amiah Miller’s silent presence in War for the Planet of the Apes is great but doesn’t transcend scenes. Lola Flanery is the standout of the young girls in Home Again and The Glass Castle has a tremendous young group but also parallel timeframes that divide time. Chiara Aurelia, however, features in flashbacks that are crucial to Gerald’s Game and her performance is breathtaking and resonates deeply.

Again like Best Song a vast majority of the choices here were from the same film. Noah Jupe is also included in Best Performance by a Young Actor in Suburbicon, so he clearly had a breakout year. How to choose among the Losers’ Club basically came down to two factors: who feeling out of place would have adversely affected the film and if all things were equal who added the most to the film. Finn actually had the disadvantage of my knowing his work from Stranger Things, however, Mike Wheeler and Richie Tozier are but superficially similar. Richie’s truer feelings are held closer to the vest than Mike’s are. Richie jokes and curses about everything whether it’s appropriate or not, many times its a defense mechanism against his fears and any other insecurity he may feel, he has to do these things elicit laughs, shrugs, eye-rolls, be relatable but also be that kid who you’d say ‘Yeah, he gets on our nerves but he’s my friend,’ that and his being the biggest foil to Bill’s single-minded mission make Finn the choice.

If you saw the nominations you probably saw this selection coming, however, not to be lost in that is the fact that all these ensembles are great, and the films worth very much worth viewing especially the under seen The Glass Castle. As for the ensemble in It they rival any of the groups that have won this award thus far.

Original screenplays are where, above all, I want to have my mind blown. One of the most mind-blowing moments I saw on film in 2017 was the introduction of the The Sunken Place. That and the concepts, the very weird, real, and only slightly off-kilter world of Get Out garner it this award.

Here, and only here, is where source material matters. 2017 saw the taming of three Stephen King beasts; two that are quite a challenge to handle; as impressive as the choices that were made in Gerald’s Game were the 21st century tack of halving It and moving it from the 1950s to the 1980s are master strokes that reinvent the story keep its spirit and make it a work wholly in and of itself simultaneously.

This one was tough. Through the years many musicians accumulate great scores (John Williams, Hans Zimmer), and some recent stars emerge and had multiple possibilities this year (Carter Burwell), but I couldn’t shake Benjamin Wallfisch out of two nominations, and his work on It combined all the techniques and styles that helped the other nominees get in: variety (Burwell), vocals (Cave & Ellis), Electronic music (Wallfisch/Zimmer) and classical orchestration (Williams), that and the score for It amped its effectiveness greatly.

Editing, among many other things, is the art of making a movie flow. Everyone can feel it if they’re attuned. In simplest terms its an anti-running time award. It clocks in at 135 minutes and is a blur; a whirlwind of emotional isolation that is what these kids are experiencing and as they join one another they strengthen. Its horror at its most relentless and the edit has much to do with it.

Again Dunkirk created some division among those who saw it, but when looking at categories I don’t look at the film overall but how it performs in its discipline. The sound of this film pounded me in my chest throughout which is the point: immersion. And in that way the film is immaculate.

Bladerunner 2049DunkirkThe Shape of WaterStar Wars: The Last JediWar for the Planet of the Apes

It’s often difficult to make this decision because of the myriad techniques and uses for effects work. Many times it just comes down to world-building and Blade Runner 2049 created quite a mesmerizing one.

Last year marked the return of this category as in 2015 I started noting great use of source music anew. Last year with even more focus on it I easily fielded a category. This year again it was easy to find films where there were great songs and they mattered. None more so than in Baby Driver.

It was Coco pulling off a four-nomination feat in this category that pushed out cover songs from consideration. Having said that Greyson Chance’s “Hungry Eyes” for ABC’s Dirty Dancing remake is remarkable and deserves a listen if you have yet to hear it.

Here are the nominees for the 2017 BAM Awards. Winners will be announced on January 9th. Some films did qualify after 12/24. Some gross omissions, as speculated in the shortlists were corrected. Collages that may feature in the honoree post will feature on my Instagram page over the course of the next week. Without any further ado … enjoy!

Sterling K. Brown Marshall
Dave Franco The Disaster Artist
Richard Jenkins The Shape of Water
Christopher Plummer All the Money in the World
Sam Rockwell Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Bill Skarsgård It